Lauren is a science and tech journalist by day and a Gottesman Library Services Associate by night. She likes to talk about a lot of things, but mostly covers how technology affects our health, behavior, education and culture. She recently attended NYU's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program and received a Master's degree in journalism. For fun, she collects comic books and browses digital library archives.

SeungYeon is a postdoctoral researcher in EdLab's Research team. Prior to joining EdLab, she finished her PhD program at University of California, Berkeley, with a concentration on Educational Statistics and Psychometrics. SeungYeon hails from a friendly town of Seoul, Korea, where she completed her MA and BS degrees in Statistics.

Before she moved to the United States, she was a math tutor in Korea for 8 years. That's when she became interested in how statistical techniques can be applied to further students' education. Her current research interests focus on application of statistical models, including psychometric models and machine learning techniques, to improve and enhance students' learning experience and results.

Originally from West Haven, Connecticut, Cinthia Fabian is now a senior at Columbia College majoring in Medicine, Literature, and Society. She delights in traveling to (and disorienting herself in) new cities, a passion that has led her to intern with nonprofit organizations ranging from the YWCA of the City of New York to Mumbai Mobile Creches in Mumbai, India to International Medical Corps in Los Angeles, California. As an Assistant Community Manager for EdLab, she is eager to explore the heretofore unfamiliar 5th floor of Russell Hall and to draw upon her previous communications experience to help strengthen the EdLab community.

A native Vermonter, Jackie headed to the Great White North to pursue a B.A. in English with a focus on drama/theatre as well as world religions and hispanic studies at McGill University. After completing an Advanced CTESOL training (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in San Francisco she soon landed in Queens to begin her four year relationship with the YMCA of Greater New York. Here she played a variety of roles including teaching workforce prep, citizenship skills, and various levels of English to immigrant adults through the New Americans Welcome Center and working as an after school program site coordinator, journalism instructor, teen advisor, and counselor for middle schoolers at the Beacon Center. Today, she functions as a producer for the video team and is in the last thesis semester of her Master of Arts in Media Studies at The New School. Outside the classroom, Jackie has worked on the production team for various clients including the United Wa...

Usa was born in Thailand. She lived and was educated in Bangkok. After her graduation from Srinakarinwirot University in 1976, she started her first career as a teacher of English at Vajiravudh College in Bangkok. Following this, she earned a Master’s degree in Higher and Adult Continuing Education in 1982 from Teachers College, Columbia University. Usa worked for Mahidol University in Bangkok as an Academic Affairs Officer before she returned to Teachers College and began working full-time at TC Library in 1988. Her responsibilities at TC library included supervising part-time employees at the Circulation & Reference Services and managing Reserve materials for faculty. Her interest and willingness to learn the new things has inspired her to earn two more Master’s degrees while working full-time at Teachers College. The areas of interest and specializations from these two graduate programs are International Educational Development with specialization in TESOL, and Communica...

A degree in Anthropology gave me the desire to explore other cultures
outside my own. My post graduate life was mostly been spent abroad,
working and traveling for six years in Asia and the Middle East. Within those six years, I
taught for five of them and I came to realize that video is often
transcendent of language and culture. Video production within my classroom was consistently an intensely creative and productive process
that I and my students always looked forward to. I took those experiences to develop into my Masters thesis at Teachers College and graduated in 2011. Currently, I am at EdLab producing educationally themed videos with an
amazing group of people.

Born and raised a carioca (original from Rio), I am a brazilian designer, creative technologist and currently interactive designer at the EdLab design team. For the past years I've been working in Rio and New York at creative agencies as a jill of all trades and through my personal work I've been addressing female empowerment as well as working with data, sound and facilitating workshops related to new technologies for the youth.

Abdul Malik is currently a student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He played soccer for BMCC's mens team during his first two years of college. He started off his junior year in college after being awarded as CUNY Male Scholar-Athlete of the year.

At EdLab, Malik works in a variety of roles. First, he assists with the digitization of archival materials for the Gottesman Libraries. He also works with library staff to fulfill patron requests via DocDel. Additionally, he works on using social media to promote EdLab tools such as New Learning Times and Vialogues. Malik is doing a series of video related research on sports and education.

A graduate of Frederick Douglass Academy, Malik was captain of the boys varsity soccer team, and was instrumental in leading the team to a division championship as a senior. He currently assists the team as an assistant coach during soccer season. Malik is enthusiastic about soccer and he is a huge fan of F.C Barcelona.

I moved to Brooklyn, New York two years ago after graduating from Berklee College of Music, where I studied drum set performance and music business.
I've wanted to work at a library again ever since my experience working for the Berklee Library and Media Center. I love reading, playing and seeing music (of course), biking, cooking, and am always interested in acquiring new skills and hobbies. I'm here helping library patrons by day and out playing shows at night.

Looking back, it should have been clear by age four that the lineage of terrible communicators I came from was going to be severely disappointed in me. This was the age at which I asked my parents what caused pregnancy, no one felt comfortable enough to answer, and I then spent every evening of the next three years terrified, praying to God by the light of my turquoise butterfly nightlight that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning pregnant like the Virgin Mary. Eventually my friend Jenna helped me crack the pregnancy mystery, my butterfly night light malfunctioned and started a minor fire in my room, and I realized there were much bigger questions to ask of Catholicism, but the burni...

You know what I miss most about childhood? Wasting the entire day playing with Legos. I think my parents were pretty lucky to have a kid who for at least six hours at a time could be completely entertained by meticulously building nonsense and then tearing it down.

My story is about jumping out of your current environment. I was born in a small town. It was very nice town with slow pace. I was a kids at that time. I like to stay there. Later, my whole family moves to a larger city and I realize that I like the new city more. There are more exciting thing happen in this city, people are more energetic and hard working. In the last semester of university, I found an intern job in GuandZhou, the third largest city in China. I have to say I really enjoy the time in GuangZhou. All people here is excellent and nice, my colleagues are very talented. Some of them are at same age as me, but already had work experience in several fortune 500 companies!

Every time I jumped out of my current environment, I found out a larger world with more exciting things. It's pretty hard to settle down in a new place but it worth trying. So I decide to come to New York.

It's always easy to stay but hard to step out. But you know It worth your trying and...

When Joann was a kid, she was all about nature documentaries. She spent Saturday mornings with Jack Hanna, PBS, and the Discovery Channel. Her most sought-after subject was, for some reason, birds. Any type of bird was her jam: songbirds, wild birds, birds of prey. She frequently checked out a bird documentary from her elementary school library that was unsurprisingly always available. While watching a program one morning, the narrator, in her lilting English accent, informed Joann that the common parakeet may be more special than she thought: they could learn to talk, just like people! Sort of. More like parrots. But worse. And males are better at it. But Joann didn’t know these limitations and so sh...

Andrew Visser is a Welsh born writer-director based in New York and London. He is a Royal Television Society award nominee, and his films have screened at festivals around the world, winning numerous prizes and accolades. As a university lecturer he teaches at one of the longest established film schools in the UK. He has a first class BA in Film and Video from the Surrey Institute of Art & Design and an MFA in Film from Columbia University's School of the Arts.

Ryan flown from Taiwan and joined EdLab's Development & Research team in 2015 and is excited to be working with a bunch of creative geniuses. He believes helping others is the fastest way to educate people, which can be done through technologies.

Sushmita Saha is a graduate of Columbia University Film Program. Her short film Bakri (The Goat) screened at film festivals around the world (Germany, New Delhi, Busan and Iran) and won the IFP audience choice award at Columbia University film festival, 2016. Sushmita teaches filmmaking to elementary school students at the East Village Community School and has served as a mentor at film programs like FOCUS Young Artists' Lab and World Economic Forum Arts Workshop.

My current music player has two billion transistors, but my
first music player had just six. It was an early transistor radio that I
received as a gift at seven years old and it became an important part of my
young life. I know that it had six transistors because the number was etched on
the nameplate at a time when the number of transistors was a selling point and
a focus of competition among my friends, some of whom, alas, had seven
transistor models.

These early transistor radios were revolutionary in their
day because they transformed the radio from a family experience organized
around a large radio in a family room into a pocket size personal experience
carried around and turned on at will with music playing through a small speaker
or an even smaller single earphone on a very thin wire. These were just fine
for the crackling AM signals that...

Kim Kefgen leads the services team and education program at the Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College. Before coming to TC, she was the Director of the Samberg Institute for Teaching Excellence at Columbia Business School where she worked on teaching and curriculum development, and led the initiative for effective and appropriate adoption of new technologies for successful teaching. She also worked in New York as a professional theater producer, director and stage manager for over fifteen years, and is a proud mother of a rising fourth grader. As a parent, she is currently a part of her daughter's School Leadership Team and a former PA Executive Board member.
Ms. Kefgen holds a BFA in Theatre from Otterbein College, an M.A. in Higher and Postsecondary Education from Teachers College, and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.
She is an enthusiastic participant in our times.

“Are you sure we don’t have any secret passageways?” I asked my parents for the hundredth time. When I was young, I spent whole afternoons scouring my house for hidden doorways or hollow walls shielding undiscovered passageways. Wouldn’t it be so cool, I thought, to find a secret space that only I knew about? Wouldn’t it be cool to find an artifact, a journal from a girl my age who lived a hundred years before I was even born? I wanted desperately to discover secrets long forgotten. But I never found a journal like this. Instead, I started writing my own so that one day I could hide it somewhere and a little girl a hundred years later would find it and feel special. I’ve kept a journal ever since.

I learned at a young age that it’s important to play to your audience, even if that audience happens to be pair of poodles, reluctantly sitting in the front row. And thus I began my adventures in storytelling by casting them as the main characters in song parodies and tall tales. Growing up alongside the computer age, I soon graduated from verbal storytel...

In the great expansion of a single life we’ve seen Veronica Black take on many collaborative challenges. As a young rebel she defied standards to encourage colleagues and neighboring community members to rally against harsh muddy sandbox mandates. Though she was condemned to never make mud in the sandbox, this didn’t mean that she couldn’t orchestrate others in a “Bring a Single Cup of Water” drive to create mud in the sandbox. As a motivational leader at a young age, Ms. Black showed that when obstacles stand in her way she calls upon her unwavering creativity to push her commu...

Iyob Gebremariam is a Software Engineer at EdLab. Originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he holds a BS in Computer Science from Yale University. He has worked as a software engineer in finance and advertising before joining EdLab. Iyob is interested in web technologies, particularly in educational tech, that foster conversation among people from various walks of life. He spends perhaps too much of his free time watching English football (soccer).

A Kentucky native, Katherine has a background in documentary video production and photojournalism. She received her M.A. in Media Studies from The New School and is excited to be a part of EdLab's video team.

Born in Kunming (the Spring City), China, Zhou joined the EdLab in 2008. He works cross-functionally at the
development and research teams with a variety of roles including software development, educational technology research, and project management. Zhou received his Ed.D. in Instructional Technology and Media from Teachers College. His rich experiences encompass educational technology, instructional design, professional development, software engineering, learning
analytics, and educational games.

I used to make architectural models. It is a small but essential industry that is devoted entirely to making people who cannot read technical drawings understand what the building they depict looks like. I made tiny versions of office buildings, commercial spaces and landscapes. For some reason it is much easier for someone to accept a very small building on a table and project all of their hopes and intentions onto it, than a two-dimensional technical drawing.

My job was not so much to make the most realistic version of a miniature office tower, it was to connect a person to a future reality so that they could make decisions, and for some reason everyone seemed to understand models.

What I found was that those Ah Ha! moments were very satisfying to create. Anyone who’s ever tried to explain a concept knows the distress of being met with glazed or frustrated expressions and, hopefully, the spark o...

For more than a decade, I performed cabaret, choral, and a cappella music. About two years into the cabarets, I first experienced performance anxiety. My right leg shook uncontrollably from the knee down. It was as if it wasn’t part of me. I firmly anchored my foot and soldiered on. To my surprise, no one was the wiser, but I wondered how I would manage, going forward.

The experience unnerved me. I considered keeping it to myself. Instead, I talked to my peers. At the next show, months later, I steeled myself. Nothing happened. In fact, I never again experienced performance anxiety. I credit that to not having kept my problem a secret.

Simone believes in the power of reinvention.

Simone Schloss graduated from Simmons College in 2017 with an MLIS, and honors from Beta Phi Mu, the International Lib...

Allen is Senior Librarian, Library Services. He provides in-class library information sessions, research consultation, and email and in-person reference service, and he's involved in developing research guides specific to the College's departments and programs for the library's website and the Learning at the Library blog. He has a BA and an MA in English literature from Cornell University, and an MS in library service from Columbia University. He is interested in promoting and supporting research mastery (a few steps beyond "information literacy"), and he finds contributing to library users' fluency in the use of rich resources very gratifying.

I remember when I was in high school, when I really started thinking about career paths, my mom told me, “whatever you do, don’t go into education.” It’s not that she was anti-education, she was an educator herself. Every day, though, she would come home with a fresh horror story from a technical and alternative high school in rural Oklahoma. I cannot even repeat some of these tales on EdLab, but I can report she is now happily retired. Of course, here I am now, sitting in Teachers College, working in the heart of education. I didn’t listen. Sorry, mom.

Ryan M. Allen is a Content Creator for the EdLab, with a specific focus on writing articles for New Learning Times. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of International...

Lyn Corno is co-editor of Teachers College Record, a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal for the field of education that has presented a variety of theoretical and empirical articles to a wide audience of readers for over a century. She is formerly Professor of Education and Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, and remains a member of the Teachers College EdLab, a collective conducting technology-oriented research and design studies under the auspices of the Teachers College, Columbia University. Prior to becoming a faculty member at Teachers College, Lyn served as Assistant Professor of Education and Psychology at the Stanford University School of Education and as a Research Associate at the Southwest Educational Research and Development Laboratory. She has also held a variety of positions, including President of Division 15 of the American Psychological Association, Chair of the Visiting Panel for Research at ETS, and Chair of the Board for the National Society for the...

Lorraine LaPrade can best be described as a “Jack(ie) of all trades.” She is a newby librarian, performance artist, and self-defense instructor. She holds a M.S. in Library Science from Long Island University, CW Post, and a M.A. in Women’s Studies from Claremont Graduate University.

When I was 15 years old I checked out a book from a public library for the first time - the Kearney Branch Public Library in Springfield, Missouri. Well, it wasn't the first time I checked out a book, but it was the first time I had done so without my parents driving me to the library. I was in a Steinbeck phase at the time, so I borrowed "Cannery Row" and "The Moon Is Down".

I borrowed these novels from the library because my family was going on a trip to Mississippi to see my grandparents for Christmas and I needed something to do. This was 1995, before the internet and smartphones were ubiquitous. I was a voracious reader in high school and college anyway, all I wanted to read were novels, novels, novels.

Twenty years later, I'm a librarian in New York -- the Acquisitions and Materials Librarian at The Gottesman Library at Teachers College, Columbia University. I maintain the library systems, help troubleshoot access problems, and work on subscriptions and...

Do you know how sometimes the universe puts exactly the right person at exactly the right time in your path? I love those stories. I love watching New Yorkers give directions, they will tell tourists 5 times how to get somewhere, and watch them to make sure they are on the right path. And you never know how a person is going to affect you.

My first job out of college was with a graphics company. They mainly...

Hui Soo Chae is Director of Research and Development for the EdLab and the Gottesman Libraries. In that capacity he leads the software development, product development, consulting, publishing and collections initiatives. Dr. Chae has led the development of a number of learning applications, including the Vialogues (www.vialogues.com) video discussion tool. His publishing initiatives have included development of the mobile publishing platform for the New Learning Times (www.newlearningtimes.com).

He has also pioneered an accelerated model to speed the delivery of educational consulting services to diverse clients, including HBO, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Peterson Foundation, and the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation. These engagements have resulted in widely regarded online curriculum resource collections in areas as diverse as democracy (Teaching the Levees) and fiscal responsibility (Understanding Fiscal Responsibility).

Bonjour tous les mondes! My name is Daniel Gardner (Dan, Danny, or D works as well. You can shuffle it to keep it interesting) and I’m an educator in training. Before I came around to embarking on this journey, I worked in solar energy for about a year and a half, after having studied Environmental Technology in college. In between I’ve had a handful of oddjobs in the city, from a stint as a part-time bike messenger, starbucks barista and barnes and noble bookseller. During my time at each, I’ve had various experiences and gained a unique perspective on how this city functions. One thing that has really had an impression on me i...

I was raised in between two cultures. My father was born in Panama and grew up in North Carolina. My mother is Chinese and grew up in Taiwan. I’m lucky to have grown up in North Carolina with a large family that I spend a lot of time with. Much of my dad’s side of the family lives in North Carolina, so I see them often. My mom and her sister live in North Carolina and their parents lived with us 6 months out of the year for as long as I can remember. Besides them, I have a lot of family in Taiwan on my mom's side. I noticed the differences in my family's culture early on. Growing up, I was always reading and would bring books to family gatherings. My mom’s side of the family would say “Patrick is so smart and studious” wh...

Xiang is a member of the research team at the EdLab. His interests lie mainly in mathematical and statistical modeling of psychological and educational problems. More specifically, Xiang's current research is in Bayesian statistics, measurement theory, educational statistics, machine learning/data mining techniques, and combinatorial algorithms. He believes that quantitative research can make a significant impact on development of educational technology.

Xiang received his undergraduate degree from Maryville College(TN) in mathematics and computer science. He is currently pursing Ph.D. in Psychometrics at Teachers College, Columbia University. Prior to joining the EdLab, Xiang was at The University of Virginia. His previous research experience include Item Response Theory, Generalizability Theory, and Computer Adaptive Testing.

Ever since his first interaction with computers and programming through the language 'Logo' in grade 3, he wanted to be a programmer. And once he experienced the magic of interaction design several years into a career of software development, he realized it perfectly brought together everything he loved about technology - the ability to solve a problem.

Sabarish is now an avid user experience designer + user interaction engineer. He has a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan, School of Information (Ann Arbor, MI) and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University (Bangalore, India).

Srujan is a Software Developer at EdLab, and simultaneously is also an MPA candidate at SIPA, Columbia University. Srujan's interests in EdLab are acting as a bridge between designers and code. He loves finding out about and learning new technology that would perfectly suit the problems at hand.

Prior to EdLab and SIPA, Srujan worked at the Reserve Bank of India as a Policy Researcher and Data Analyst, at a Financial Technology firm as a Quant Developer, and at an Education Technology startup as the Technology Lead. Besides technology, his interests are broad, including Economic Policy, Governance, Public Finance and Development.

Srujan graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 2012, with a Bachelors in Technology. He lived in Hyderabad and Mumbai, India prior to moving to New York.

In Bruegel's painting "Landscape with the Fall ofIcarus", the Greek mythological character flies too close to the sun and
falls to his death, unseen by the inhabitants of the bustling seaside community
into whose harbor he plunges. The painting inspired the poet W.H. Auden to
write about humanity's indifference to suffering: